Spill O'Reilly

Media and culture Ch 1-2

One of the most interesting things to me in these chapters was talking about ethics, and particularly the bit about how the media should cover war. It is really difficult for the media to try to inform the public, without endangering our troops by giving away their position or inflaming anti-American sentiment. On top of that, the news outlet has an image to mantain, and may damage thier patriotic image by being to critical of the war, or make their party affiliations fuzzy by having an opposing stance on the events.

The reading brought up the episode of Nightline that listed all the members of the armed forces killed in action in Iraq, which was not aired in certain cities because the network deemed it too political. While I disagree that the program should have been canceled, I think that an important point was made when it was pointed out that the program "ignored other aspects of the war effort". Forty minutes of listing names of the fallen has an increadably strong impact, and I think that having faces put to the nameless mass of soilders we knew were in Iraq causes people to think more about what is going on, but without it being balanced with a little more information it has a pretty heavy anti war message attached. I think that having Nightline focus more on the issues of the war, and more of the actual events that were going on and then going into the memorial it would have been more balanced and informative. The way it was carried out was certainly more dramatic, and it probably packed more of a punch that way, but to me it seems much more like stiring up drama than informing people.

Media Unlimited

In Media Unlimited, Tod Gitlin talks about how we are overwhelmed with sounds and images in our lives, and how they are changing the way we live. The premise of this book really excited me, I have a brother who is five years younger than me, and the difference between media in his life and mine is pretty intense. I was looking forward to finding out more about how being so wired is changing how we live and think, but I was disappointed to find the book so dry and outdated. (Although it was kind of impressive and a little scary to see how dramatically media changed in 8 years.) I had two solid 4 hour bus rides to dive into this book, and I could really only manage about thirty pages at a time, partially due to the pacing, and also because most of the references just weren't relevant anymore. When I did find a bit I got interested in, it only seemed to last a page or so before the academic droning continued. I could blame my short attention span on how used to instant gratification I've become with modern media, but I think it had more to do with how drawn out and academic the text became, and my struggle to related to outdated references I didn't follow when they were relevant.